Weak
by 957
Summary: Sakura is devastated when Sasuke leaves. She sets a goal and leaves Konoha on her quest to grow strong. She comes back at 17, and what does she find? That she's the strongest kunoichi in Konoha and one waiting, regretful Uchiha.
1. Weak

Summary: "Sakura is devastated when Sasuke leaves. She sets a goal to not be weak, also leaving and training. She comes back at 17, and what does she find? That she's the strongest kunoichi in Konoha and one waiting, regretful Uchiha."

A/N: Hey guys, I'm making a new story! No, I haven't really given up my other stories, I've just been busy… really, REALLY busy. Hopefully I'll get them up along with this one. Here, Sakura and the others start out like they do in the anime, but after that it's completely different. NOT PLOT ORIENTED. Anyway, please review! :P

"_Sasuke-kun!" I called out happily, waving my hand frantically as I ran to catch up with the dark-haired prodigy. We were in the middle of the Konoha Park. He was walking calmly, hands in pockets, onyx eyes gazing out from behind his spiked hair. His bangs shadowed his face._

_He didn't stop walking, didn't stop to acknowledge me._

_But that was okay. I was sort of used to it. Not that that would discourage me to quit fawning after him. I didn't think anything would. He was too perfect, too handsome, too talented and cool. Naruto, on the other hand, the obnoxious, blue-eyed boy who seemed to like me, since he was always asking me to go to Ichiraku's with him, was annoying, and nothing but. I had no idea why Sasuke even spoke to him at all. I mean, seriously, who would want to hang out with Naruto? _

_I puzzled over this for a moment, then snapped back to the present. Sasuke had gotten ahead, and I mean realllly ahead. I ran again, just to catch up with him._

"_Sasuke-kun," I puffed, finally reaching the quiet prodigy's side. Usually he would ignore me or push me aside with a cold word, and perhaps a look of irritation, but this time he gave me a look of contempt. I was surprised - he never did that. He was to "gentlemanly" - too polite. I stopped._

_He glared at me with eyes that seemed to cut down to my soul. "You're annoying."_

_I opened my mouth, about to speak, when he added, "Even more annoying than the dobe."_

_Now, that hurt. Naruto was really obnoxious. To think that Sasuke thought that way too made me wince._

"_But, Sasuke-kun-"_

"_No, Sakura," he cut in harshly. "Listen. I suggest - no, I demand - that you stop chasing after me. I'm sick of stupid girls obsessing over me when I obviously don't care about them. You're one of them."_

_I stared at him in shock, hurt beyond words. His glare was so dark, murderous, intense, that I couldn't even think to interrupt._

"_Tonight, I'm leaving. There's nothing in Konoha to keep me here, and there's nothing here to help me gain more power. I'm leaving, and no one can stop me." He glared at me, obsidian eyes shooting kunais. _

_My eyes widened; I couldn't imagine life without Sasuke. "Don't go," I begged, my eyes beginning to water with unshed tears. But those tears would, and soon._

_He scoffed at me. "This is exactly what I mean. You're weak. You're pathetic. Get yourself another guy."_

_Cherry blossom trees waved around us; petals swirled downwards. I automatically caught one as it fluttered past me and felt its velvety softness. "But Sasuke-kun," I said softly, "I love you."_

_His dark eyes narrowed a fraction. He moved like lightning; disappeared before I even noticed, struck in a flash, but was eerily silent. I felt him strike a pressure point behind me and my eyelids shut to a slit. It took all of my effort to keep conscience. _

_As my eyes slowly closed, I heard a last sound, a sound that I would've done anything to remember. The sound of his voice._

"_Sakura . . ."_

_I struggled not to black out and heard his final words._

"_Goodbye." _

That was a month ago. When I woke up I was in my room, lying on top of a made bed. I knew that it hadn't been a dream, and that I hadn't gotten here myself, and I also knew that someone else had been here. My parents had both died on a mission, and I lived alone.

I never made my bed.

After I recalled what had happened, I cried. I cried for hours and days and weeks, and it was only at my worried teammate and sensei's insistence that I'd rejoined the team, training, and missions.

But now, I was in Tsunade's office. She was the Hokage, the leader and most respected person in our village. I stood straight and to attention as she surveyed me critically.

"Sakura, I've heard that you' haven't been paying attention to your normal extent recently."

I winced. Who else could have told her that I was suffering because of Sasuke's disappearance other than what was left of my team?

"Yes," I said stiffly.

She shifted. I could see the dark circles under her eyes, the mounds of paperwork scattered over her desk, the tired yet focused look in her eyes. "Sakura, I understand that you have been troubled by your teammate's leave. We all are. But no one else is letting this get in their way. We are shinobi. We must take the facts, block our emotions, and do the job. As I have been hearing, you are not doing as you should."

I looked down in embarrassment and shame. It was true; the closest people to Sasuke, had there been anyone he was close to, would have to be me, Naruto, and Kakashi. Naruto was really upset by his absence, but after he had gotten over the worst of it in a few days he had gotten back to his usual, cheerful self, though he was punctuated by many a sad look, word, or sigh whenever the subject of Sasuke came up. He didn't let it interfere with his training or his life.

It was true. Naruto was strong.

"I'm sorry, Tsunade-sama. I'll work harder."

She nodded, clearly not believing my feeble attempt at redeeming myself. I was dismissed. With a sigh I exited the room.

I contemplated the matter as I walked back down the long spiral of stone steps, outside to where Kakashi and Naruto were waiting. _I have to be strong, like Naruto and the others. What did Sasuke-kun say about me? I'm . . . weak. I need to get strong. _My eyes narrowed. _Then no one can sneer or laugh at me. No one can call me weak. _And somehow, right there and then, I settled something conflicting within myself. Unlike my previous pathetic attempts at convincing myself to stop thinking about Sasuke, for the first time in a month, perhaps forever, my whirling, confused, and love-sick thoughts vanished. I was left with a cold, determined self-consciousness, and a goal. My heart stilled for a second. _A goal. An ambition. Isn't that what Sasuke-kun said he had? That's what he left for. So he could complete his goal. _A spine-wracking shiver coursed through me and I immediately focused.

I wouldn't be weak.

I'd start by cutting the title off of his name. _Sasuke. Just Sasuke. No Sasuke-kun._

Now I'd have to seriously stop thinking about him. There would just be training.

I met Kakashi and Naruto outside where they were waiting, looking worried. Naruto rushed up to me.

"Are you okay, Sakura-chan?" he asked anxiously. I nodded self-consciously. "Let's go train."

They stared at me in amazement and confusion. I stared hard at them, and we left for the training grounds without another word.

I was weak. I was extremely smart, but also very weak in strength, speed, and techniques. Ninjutsu? Taijutsu? Genjutsu? I knew about them, but only through books. I could barely do any in real life. For the first time I really realized my situation and how critical it was. I shouldn't be called a shinobi.

For a week I trained with Team 7 and for a week I grit my teeth over those words: _I'm weak._ My endurance ended long before Kakashi's or Naruto's. I was slowing them down, and they were worried about _me_. This was not going to continue.

I asked for Tsunade again, and when I was let in, she growled at me, "What do you want?"

Usually she was serious and tolerable, but I guessed that today was not one of those days. I bowed and said, "Excuse me for my interruption, Tsunade-sama, but I have a request to make."

She looked at me for a moment and leaned back in her seat. "What is it?"

I took a deep breath. "I wish to terminate my training with my team and missions for a while. I want to train by myself, where I can go at my own pace. So I won't have to drag the others behind with me."

Her eyes flashed, alarmed, and then with understanding. She nodded slightly, thinking. After several minutes she gave me another nod of consent. "Of course. But don't make it too long. You have friends and a team concerned for you." Sakura nodded. "Now send in Kakashi for me. I need to speak with him."

And that was the end of my presence in Team 7.

At least, for "a while". And I had no idea how long that would be.

A/N: Soo, do you like it? No? Hm, I'm continuing it anyway. :D But please, please review!


	2. Trance

A/N: hey guys, I just wanted to say, I might 'll be switching between 1st and 3rd POVs for Sakura. It would have been completely 3rd person from the beginning but I wanted Sakura's thoughts to be known, so…

Oh, and I also changed the summary. Because I changed the plot. After the first chapter. I am sooo inconsistent.

One more thing. I'm not Japanese, so I'm soooo not good at any Japanese customs, titles, and the names of the techniques… so bear with me, okay? I'm improvising. Or, I might just make the jutsus in English…

Ok, you know the drill… read and review! :D

_Thoughts_

Text

**Jutsus**

I pushed chakra into my leg and slammed it into the thick trunk of the tree I was currently practicing on.

Perhaps "practicing" wouldn't be the best term for it. Maybe "venting out my anger at being so damn weak" would be better.

Either way, I wasn't getting any younger. Or stronger, in my case.

I had ended my presence in the team a week ago. And a week ago minus one hour, I had stopped using the wooden training posts. Not only did they seem childish for an Academy graduate old genin like me, but after the first chakra-powered kick I'd sent at it halfheartedly, it had promptly flown out of existence, torn out of its wooden base. To this day I have no idea where it ended up.

So my chakra control was near-perfect. I still had plenty to improve on. For example, my taijutsu, my ninjutsu, my genjutsu. Strength, speed, technique, quick thinking.

Everyday for this past week I had been in a sort of trance, not speaking with anyone, training almost constantly, stopping rarely for food and water. And that was only to fuel myself to keep going. I had no time for sleep, only enough to replenish my chakra to a reasonable amount. When my chakra ran out during my training I would continue with only taijutsu. Heaven knows I could use the extra training.

I could tell that my friends were worried for me, particularly Kakashi and Naruto. I had told them repeatedly not to be concerned, slightly impatient on the inside because they were wasting my precious training time speaking with me. But I quieted my inner self (um, multiple personality disorder? You bet.) and listened to them, because I still cared. It was me they were worried about.

But the rest of my time was dedicated solely to, you guessed it, ninjutsu. I had no idea how to begin before deciding to ask some of the others how to perform the simpler jutsus that didn't need a special bloodline limit or requirement. For the next month I slowly built up on my stamina, the ease with which I blocked attacks (from sparring occasionally with Naruto or Ino, though I suspected heavily that Naruto was going wayyy too easy on me), and my knowledge of ninjutsu and taijutsu techniques.

When I was alone I would practice and hone these techniques. I started with easier ones, contrary to my impatience at my lack of skill. I didn't want my chakra to be used up by large amounts with the more difficult jutsus, because if I practiced easier ones I could practice and refine them more before I tired.

As I advanced, I found myself leaning toward fire jutsus. One of the ones I practiced often was _Katon: Gokakyu no Jutsu_, which I also remembered happened to be one of Sasuke's "favorites". Not that the coldhearted jerk _had_ any favorites. Just preferences. Whatever.

As soon as I made the possibly false/true connection that my lean towards fire jutsus was because of Sasuke, I immediately turned to water. Part of me mused if the sudden change was because water ultimately quenched fire, like I was trying to get over the Uchiha. The rest of me just concentrated on improving.

So for the next few months I built up on my stock of knowledge and physical skill, either practicing jutsus or drills to hone physical or mental aspects that needed work or sparring with others to test myself and my learning rate. That way I could roughly gauge how my training was going. At first I lost nearly all of the spars, but as they progressed to the present I expanded my opponents and started to win quite a few of them.

Tsunade had requested that I make trips to the Hokage Tower so she herself could test my growing abilities. "After all, I am responsible for the shinobi of my village," she'd said proudly when I asked her why. "And, because I haven't got much to do besides paperwork."

So, with time, I began to look forward to the weekly "visits", or rather, intense training sessions, where Tsunade herself would happily excuse herself from paperwork and come down with me to a private training ground behind the tower. I'd also begun to learn healing with her, at her insistence and at my interest.

The sessions grew longer and more often. I felt myself improving rapidly with Tsunade's help, and got along well with her rash, unpredictable, yet lovable personality. Yeah, I know, a teacher, lovable? Well, get over it. _You_ wouldn't know. _You're _not the one starred in a Japanese ninja fic somewhere in Japan. I think.

Tsunade had me heal injured birds and animals, teaching me to conjure, control, and concentrate certain amounts of the glowing, green healing chakra. She taught me about the different parts of the human body, the muscles and tendons and veins, vital organs, and how to heal them. She taught me about chakra and pressure points and how to knock someone unconscious with a simple poke of a finger. She taught me how to control my chakra precisely, exactly, which wasn't too hard, considering my already near-perfect chakra control. She also taught me to concentrate chakra into different parts of my body so I could either hit something extremely hard or block powerful attacks and come away with hardly a scratch. However, both methods involved using a lot of chakra, which I wasn't ready for.

Soon I had advanced to the point where Tsunade allowed me to heal human wounds. Soon bruises, cuts, and bone fractures I could heal with relative ease.

So when Naruto asked me for a spar, I agreed, feeling wary but pretty confident.

Kakashi had spent some time training Naruto, as the blonde ninja expressed loudly and daily his "extreme need" to go and "rescue that Uchiha jerk" from the "gross snake bastard". So the silver-haired jounin and Tsunade, our mentors, both settled to watch our spar.

I took a fighting stance, a kunai in one hand. Naruto took up a similar position a distance away.

"Be careful, Sakura-chan," he warned me in his obnoxious, cheerful tone. "I've been training with Kakashi and people and I don't want you to get hurt."

"Don't hold back," I said with a roll of my eyes, while Tsunade smirked in the background. Then I charged.

A look of slight alarm registered in his eyes before he jumped up, dodging my kunai swipe at the place that used to be his head. I skidded to a halt, now directly beneath him, which was to my advantage. I flashed through hand signs that were too fast to be seen with an untrained eye. "**Shuriken Barrage**!"

Faster than you can say "Omgthatwasfast", several razor-sharp shuriken were bombarded at the blonde ninja over my head. He had used chakra in his jump, and a little too much, I observed, because he was still in the air. Falling. Some fifty feet above me.

Naruto gave a yell and there was a small _poof_ as he made a clone, which he caught by the arm and swung downward, into my attack. The clone _poof_ed out of existence in a small white cloud of smoke.

Then, _out_ of the smoke came another clone, wielding a kunai. The clone flipped out a bunch of weapons and flung them in quick succession at my head.

I blocked or deflected all of them with my kunai, each metal weapon making a sharp, clinking, screeching sound as it came in contact with my own.

The greetings were over. The spar had begun.

In the shade of the big oak tree, sitting next to everybody's favorite silver-haired one-eye-showing perverted jounin, Tsunade smirked again. "She was always showy."

Kakashi grunted, somehow both peering at his orange book and watching the spar with interest at the same time – with one eye. "Like you."

She grinned. "Touché."

Meanwhile I had run out of the way, not wanting to be caught between Naruto and the ground, and shot a kunai and several shuriken at the blonde, who was about five feet from the ground. He spun around at the last millisecond and caught the kunai by its handle first, before deflecting the rest of the shuriken almost lazily with it.

As soon as his feet touched the grass he charged at me. I lingered in my position, waiting to see what he would do. He came at me with a flying side kick. When he was within a foot of my person I deftly stepped to the side.

But that wasn't it. I grabbed his foot as it flew past me and redirected his momentum into throwing him into a tree, headfirst.

As expected, Naruto flung out his hands in an attempt to stop his bashing into said tree. The result was him nearly shattering all the bones in both wrists and arms. I grinned and cracked my knuckles.

Tsunade smirked at Kakashi.

While my temporarily-ex-teammate was out, I bit my thumb and flashed through another series of hand signs. "**False Summoning Technique**!"

This was something I'd half made up, from my pickings of other peoples' summoning jutsus and genjutsus. In a swirl of cherry blossoms entered several dark, undistinguishable forms, wielding dangerous claws and lethal teeth. They circled towards Naruto, surrounding him. I plopped down to watch.

There's something to be said for Naruto's uncanny ability of fast self-healing and sucking it up to stand up and fight again. He demonstrated that ability here, groaning with pain but getting up all the same to face me.

Or rather, face the illusion/summoned forms I'd pitted him against.

The jutsu was actually half of both. I summoned the forms to act as an illusion to the target. Get it? No? Oh well.

There were several ways the illusion could work. In this particular method, the forms would become the target's most feared thing. The target would then be cast in a foreign, false area in the person's mind, where the forms would change and torment them. Only mentally, of course. Wait, no… mentally _and_ physically, as the figures were physical.

As the victim must stop his own chakra flow to escape a genjutsu, in this case he first has to stop the flow and then defeat the physical "force".

So, although the technique wasn't exactly mentally scarring, it was pretty dangerous… sometimes. If I worked on it more.

Let's take a look at what Naruto's most afraid of.

The forms had stopped circling around him, and he was staring at them like the secret of life was in them. Slowly the figures melted, then took the shape of . . .

What? Ramen?

Naruto's mouth began watering, and his eyes sparkled. "Ramen . . . I love you ramen . . . but where are you going? What are you – OMYGAHHH-"

Several long strands of the unhealthy but frequently-eaten-by-a-certain-obnoxious-shinobi ramen gathered themselves and whipped out, catching Naruto in a strangle hold.

My eyes widened by a fraction and I had to compose myself before I started laughing. I hoped Naruto would find a way out of it before he lost too much air…

He was still gagging and coughing out half-strangled, shouting curses and insults and foul language. I winced at his unusually extended vocabulary, then paused as the noodles unwound themselves slowly.

They melted together into a messy glob, before recomposing into some kind of form… a person? Someone with dark, spiky hair… wearing a blue shirt that was crested with the Uchiha emblem –

My breath caught in my throat.

Sasuke. Uchiha Sasuke. Naruto was afraid that he wouldn't be able to reach and save him in time.

A/N: Ok, that's another chapter down… Whew, that's a bit longer than my usual chapter length, which isn't saying much cuz I usually don't write much… I apologize for my lack of creativity and awesomeness, especially in the months where Sakura is improving and in the fight scene…

Hope you like it. Reviews are EXTREMELY welcome! HINT


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